See, I read this situation as entirely differently. Google is not being unreasonable in understanding that they can't afford to store all data from everyone in

See, I read this situation as entirely differently. Google is not being unreasonable in understanding that they can't afford to store all data from everyone indefinitely. They are not being unreasonable that it is a potential security risk. Where they are being unreasonable is that they have basically gotten everyone addicted to their "free" product, and then, a decade after promoting the idea that no one should run their own services, they should just use free offers in the cloud: they are now admitting the downsides to this arrangement. That Google account that your dead friend had that you keep on your buddy list because it gives you memories? Gone. That Facebook account with your dead family members photos and timeline? Gone. The Twitter account with all the tweets from you child who died too soon? Gone. The lesson should be that if you're hoping for someone else to be the steward of all your digital histories, you're in for a bad time. If you're on someone else's servers, you're bound by their rules, because much like going to their building, you are on their private property. The thing is, they spent over a decade making sure that people trusted that their data would always be there, and that storing it in someone else's private property indefinitely, somehow, wasn't a problem. It was always a problem. If you want to keep your data indefinitely, you have to know how to store it yourself on your own storage mediums that you keep in your own home and on your own computers/servers. So, Google is currently doing nothing wrong, based on the realities of security and cost of data storage. The wrong they did was convincing users for over a decade that this wouldn't happen, knowing full well that eventually it would.